


Rememberin'

by Miss_Femm



Category: Blast of Silence (1961)
Genre: Blast of Silence (1961) - Freeform, Orphanage, Orphans, Post-Canon, Smoking, introspective, noir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 03:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15698784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Femm/pseuds/Miss_Femm
Summary: Lori reads about Frankie's fate in the newspapers. (Takes place after the film, so spoilers naturally.)





	Rememberin'

A day after the cops drag up the water-logged corpse, Lori reads about Frankie’s death in the newspapers. She’s standing by the stove waiting for the coffee to finish when she finds out just what the police know: he was a hired killer, linked with this mob or that, thirty-two years old, no permanent address. Nothing more.

The knowledge of his true profession makes chills run through her limbs, though after the revelation settles in, she isn’t much shocked. Frankie was a hard-boiled man—an angry man. Even his finer feelings seemed tainted by a desire to revenge himself upon… something.

Why did I even invite him over? Lori thinks. He was a stranger, really. And a dangerous one!

Lori could never figure Frankie out, even when they were children shivering in an underfunded orphanage. She and the others took things as they came, but Frankie never could overcome the bitterness. Even the nuns found something eerie in his nature: Lori keenly remembers Sister Luke calling him “demonic” after a nasty fist-fight with another boy during afternoon recess, his knuckles tightened and red, his eyes lacking any shame for the boy’s swollen face. Yet no one ever suspected him of being anything other than a troubled child with a bad temper; it was assumed that enough discipline and prayer would reform him eventually.

Sometimes, she and Frankie would hide out back behind the school, sharing a cigarette he’d swiped one way or another, and he’d reveal little things about himself, things he wouldn’t dream of telling anyone: I actually kinda like doing those paintings in that class. I wanna draw comics. Maybe I wanna be a cartoonist. It’s stupid, I know…

Lori wonders what happened to those dreams, to that boy. Even as a grown man, there was a sense of the lost little boy about him, a sadness mingling with that hate in his stare. It made him pitiable. Even that awful kiss on Christmas seemed desperate, a cry to be known, understood.

Lori tries not to be angry about it, but for the past two days she’s felt the bruises on her wrists and wonders what he was thinking. She wants to feel sorrier for Frankie Bono than she does. She wishes she could forgive him more fully. She wonders if she should have said something else over the phone when he called on the twenty-sixth—but what more was there to say? Maybe there were some people you just couldn’t fix. God knows, she wasn’t obligated to fix anyone… she had her own wounds to mend.

Poor Frankie, she thinks, folding up the paper and putting it aside once the coffee finishes. Her attention returns to New Years’ preparations and what she’ll feed her dieting mother-in-law when she comes to visit.


End file.
